| Recent historiography has revealed an intricate network of relationships, attitudes, perceptions, emotions, and expressions in the nineteenth-century world of the master and the slave. Over the past twenty to thirty years, new kinds of evidencesuch as oral accounts and slave narrativeshave been considered in an attempt to develop a fuller understanding of a "peculiar institution" that grew, and prospered, in democratic America for over two hundred years. The effect has been to see the institution through the eyes of the slave, not simply through the eyes of the master. This viewing has helped to reveal a world more complex than Ulrich Phillips's 1918 depiction of plantations as "schools," to reveal a world closer to that imagined by Wendell Phillips, "when the lions [would write] history.'' In this world black culture and the black family are more complex than had been believed; the human element has been restored to the abstraction "slave"; people suffer, grow, ponder, and dream; and slaves, with the depth and complexity of other people, emerge in the literature. |
| In the field of black literary criticism, complementary developments are occurring as "the canon" is broadened to include more black literature, as course offerings in black literature increase in number, as the rhetorical qualities of black literature are explored. Increasingly, the power to defineas understood by such diverse nineteenth-century figures as Wendell Phillips and Lewis Carrollis viewed as an aspect of power. From this perspective, the "grand theorists" of American literary criticism (either those who view the American novel, irrespective of race, as the expression of a romance tradition in literature or those who see the quintessential protagonist as an American male, separating himself from society and developing in the wilderness, on the river, or on the ocean) are seen to |
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CIP